md_ wrote at May 1, 2018 at 9:03 PM
(edited at May 1, 2018 at 9:05 PM)

An aspiring censor could also "easily connect to the broader network" and masquerade as a federated server in order to discover others. This process could even be automated.

Federated services also require an identifier, and this identifier usually indicates where the user's account is located and how to connect with them (e.g. user@domain.com). As people share these identifiers, the aspiring censor can just keep adding new entries to the blacklist.

That's something very easy for censors. I mean just look at the Tor Project's bridge distribution, even though there are loads of non-public bridges, China is able to keep up and block virtually all of them. But, domain fronting works in China.

throwaway38yyzew wrote at May 1, 2018 at 9:11 PM
(edited at May 1, 2018 at 9:12 PM)

Throwaway here, this affects many other FOSS projects like the Tor Browser which has a high usage meek-amazon pluggable transport. It's really sad to see that the Russia block of Telegram and another app (which apparently relies on Amazon) gave the financial incentive to Amazon to drop support for this (Russia blocked a ton of Amazon's IPs). As you can see yet again, capitalism in action. Sad.